PHILLIPS HEADSTONE

Pte. William Phillips at long last is buried beside his buddy, Pte. J.L. Collins in Bray Vale British Cemetery.

WILL 1918

Pte. William Phillips in 1918, the year he died.

PHILLIPS AND COLLINS

Australian War Memorial photo

Pte. William Phillips, back left, standing beside Pte. J.L. Collins. They were buried together, but for 80 years, another soldier's name was engraved on the stone beside Collins at Bray Vale British Cemetery, south of Albert, France.

BRAY-SUR-SOMME, FRANCE For 84 years, Private William Phillips was missing, lying underneath another man's headstone.

The soldier was killed in the final months of the war, when the front lines were moving quickly. He was buried on the battlefield near Bray-sur-Somme, but when the graves were moved into cemeteries in 1919, he was recorded as missing, his body classified as an unknown soldier.

The popular jockey was one of the thousands of Australians with no known grave commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. It was something that wasn't questioned by the family, who were never told many details about his final resting spot.

The location didn't come from a DNA test, or an exhumation. It was a curious relative who, after years of archival research, found a very specific map on the other side of the world, at McMaster University in Hamilton.

More than a decade ago, out of general interest, 54-year-old Scott Arthur decided to "have a peek to see exactly where this bloke is."

The bloke was his great-uncle William Phillips, a 30-something jockey, five-foot-two officially, when he signed up for war. Will, as he was known, left behind a sweetheart who never married, and adoring nieces and nephews. He was one of the 416,000 men to enlist in Australia, then a British dominion with just under five million people. He was one of the 61,513 who never came home.

When his mother Alice found out the bad news, she went to her room and never came out. She died in November 1918.

Arthur, who lives in Newcastle, a city in New South Wales, Australia, thought it was one of those old family legends, but later found a newspaper clipping about poor Alice Phillips.

"I felt sorry for her, the vision of that old woman going to her bed and never getting back out," he says. "She fretted herself to death."

In war of such industrial scope, it is sometimes difficult to makes sense of the way life and death are organized.

When Arthur found "62 D L.7.c" next to his uncle's name, he thought it might be a cemetery reference. There was another number — " ... exhumed from Bray-sur-Somme 100 metres south of road junction to Point 107."

But no graveyard matched the series of numbers and letters. He was vexed, and left it alone. Two years later, he was flipping through a book of Great War aerial photography. "62D" jumped off the page: it was a grid reference.

"That's when I went looking for the maps," he says.

The Lloyd Reeds maps collection at McMaster University is busy at the end of the semester, the last-minute types scanning maps for their final geography project.

This utilitarian room is filled with globes and atlases; old First World War maps marked "SECRET," the German versions, "Geheim!"

The maps, some with pencil notations, show the radial setup of most French towns, and the countryside, with little circles marking the roadside trees Napoleon planted so his troops would be shaded and have more energy on their marches. In 1914, Napoleon had about the same historical distance as General Douglas Haig does now.

Maps specialist Gord Beck, dressed in a red plaid shirt, his brown hair showing a touch of grey, is happy to explain the old secrets. At the outset of a war that was supposed to be over in months, nobody thought there'd be much use for maps.

"They couldn't use the traditional tactics," he explains. "They had to defend themselves in trenches. They needed very detailed maps."

The early maps were a disaster. Each country used its own capital city as the zero point on the grid, so reference points were of little help. The French used metric measurements, the British the imperial system. A red trench on a British map was a German trench, the same colour on a French map marked an Allied trench. By the latter half of the war, these kinks were worked out, and the modern standardized system was born, with contour lines for elevation, an improvement that proved so helpful for the artillery.

The university's First World War trench map and aerial photography collection is one of the most extensive in Canada, only rivalled by Ottawa's federal collections. Beck is always fielding calls from researchers and museums in France and Belgium. Aerial photos from this collection are reproduced throughout the Western Front, showing the scope of damage wrought by the war. All of these files are being digitized, and many are already online. When Arthur came calling, the map digitization hadn't started yet.

"He went in and dug out the map physically and photocopied it," he says, "and that's where I could see the different roads that the French burial officer had mentioned."

Beck knew what the code meant. The map was sheet 62D, the main location within square L7, in the southwest quadrant "D."

From the French burial reports, Arthur knew his great-uncle had been "exhumed from Bray-sur-Somme 100 metres south of road junction to Point 107."

Beck sent him the relevant maps. For the first time, he had a detailed look at his great-uncle's first resting place.

When Phillips died in 1918, the front lines were in constant flux. The Germans took Bray-sur-Somme in their spring offensive, but as Allied forces pushed back in the Battle of Amiens, the Australians took the town back. Phillips died two days before that happened. He was buried by the battalion padre, who sent home his personal effects.

Arthur researched the soldiers who died on the same day as his great-uncle, looked at their battlefield burial sites, and their eventual cemetery locations.

When he looked at the map references, he noticed that one man, Private J.L. Collins, had the same reference: "62 D L.7.c." The Australian records that he researched showed that the two men buried at that reference point were exhumed and placed side by side at Bray Vale cemetery — Collins, with his identity disc, was buried with his name, the other soldier buried as an "Unknown Australian Soldier."

Shortly after the war, on the cross marking J.L. Collins' grave, someone had written the name of another soldier from the unit, a man who had been exhumed from a different location on the battlefield, according to Arthur's research. In 1923, the misidentification became official, and that man's name went on the headstone next to Collins.

Arthur presented his research to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 2005.

"My family understands that the task undertaken by the IWGC was a great one, and that the utmost care and reverence was shown toward the Commonwealth's fallen," he wrote. "There can be no doubt, however, that this member of our family has rested in Bray Vale British Cemetery for over 80 years with another man's headstone marking his grave."

Two years later, the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs wrote back. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission had accepted his findings. The soldier whose name was engraved on the headstone next to Collins is now commemorated at a nearby cemetery.

"Processes will now be instigated to place a headstone for Private Phillips over this grave and your family will be contacted regarding the inscription to be included."

At Bray Vale British Cemetery, 10 kilometres south of Albert, the slow-dripping faucet of rain is suddenly turned to full pressure. The engraved names of Australian and British soldiers are difficult to read when the raindrops coat the headstones. The letters on Phillips' grave, engraved in 2008, are sharper: "He gave his best. His life. His all."

During the course of his research, Arthur found a photograph taken the day his great-uncle died, in the Australian War Memorial archive.

"I nearly fainted when I saw him looking at me with that grin," Arthur says. "My hair still jumps up the back of my neck."

In the photo, Phillips is staring out with a "cocky grin" on his face, wearing the felt hat of the Aussie soldiers, standing like a jockey, one foot in front, German soldiers in the foreground, Private Collins beside him — another piece of evidence that shows how close they were the day they died.

"From what I can figure out, I reckon he'd probably been killed with Jack Collins not long after that photo was taken," Arthur says.

Phillips was a battalion runner. Perhaps they were running between headquarters, and a shell got them, he says.

They are buried side by side, in the deceptive valleys of the Somme, where villages disappear with a few descending steps and cars on distant ridges look like they're straddling the edge of the earth.

"It's a lovely area," Arthur says from his home in Australia, of a place he has only seen in photos. "I must go there one day."